Isaac Lahey Imagines

We All Hope for Something

You are utterly, utterly alone. It's a late night, but even as the darkness rushes in to paint the sky the deepest shade of indigo you've ever seen, you fight the chill to stay outside. You don't want to go back to your house, not when it means going back to your parents. You don't know how much longer you can take it, but graduation seems all too far away.

The sound of a slamming door ripples through the previously quiet neighborhood, and you look up to see a boy about your age leaving his house as well amidst a chorus of angry yells from his father. Even from this distance, you can just make out blond curls falling around his face, and a hopeless look on his face that no doubt matches your own expression.

This is a pattern you've seen repeated fairly often over the last few months. You run from your own home a few times, coming back late at night when your parents are asleep, and sometime in that dark hour you see the boy doing the exact same thing. You've never really talked to Isaac Lahey outside of school or some sort of necessity, but you somehow get the feeling that he could understand everything currently churning through your head.

Honestly, it's difficult to describe your relationship with Isaac. You wish it could be more than it was, because in the midst of high school you somehow found yourself crushing hard, but there's not a whole lot you can do. Isaac tends to keep to himself, despite your best efforts, although he's been better at letting you in.

The two of you talk at school, always look to each other whenever a teacher announces that you'll be having a mandatory partner assignment, and if you need to talk to someone you'd go to him first, and vice versa. At the same time, though, most of that is just what results from being the two quiet kids in a classroom, always on the outskirts of a hubbub of activity. You almost think that you're Isaac's only friend, and that should mean something, right?

Yet you can't quite convince yourself that it means as much as you wish it did. You'd like Isaac to wake up one day and notice you, really notice you, as more than a neighbor or a girl who goes to his school. You noticed him for that a while back, so why can't it happen to Isaac, too? No matter how much you want it, though, people in a place like this don't change unless they have to, and Isaac's no exception. He leaves his house without a second glance, and you don't try to follow.

Instead, you take up your usual routine of walking through the streets surrounding your house. The cold air is a mixed blessing, helping you stay awake but painful against the bruises and cuts that you'll have to hide tomorrow morning. It'll only get colder and colder until you can't take it anymore, but for now, you are content to wander in the silence.

Somewhere out there, Isaac Lahey has left his house, headed for a friend's place or somewhere else, you don't know. You have no idea if he even knows you're here at all, if he's even seen you before or knows that you're somehow in the exact same situation as him.

Some days, you hate this, the fact that no matter how hard you try, every day seems the same and nothing gets better. Some days, you hate yourself for not making things better, for searching all day and all night for the escape you know will never be yours. Some days, you don't hate anything at all, but feel nothing but gray, endless gray.

When you can't take the cold anymore, you turn your tracks back towards your house, reluctantly making the journey back to your door. By the time you turn onto your street, though, you can't shake the feeling that something is wrong. It's a little too quiet for this time of night, as if even the owls and crickets have ceased to play their tunes, afraid of something that is now skulking in the night beside you.

Your steps quicken as you cross the street. A few feet up your driveway, you realize that the front door is hanging off of its hinges. It's lying in the grass a few feet away, the ground slick with something despite the fact that it's too early for the dew to taint the yard. You're almost afraid to go inside, but you do anyway.